


kaleidoscope telescope

by scioscribe



Category: James Bond (Movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Chemistry, Gen, Hallucinations, Interrogation, Surveillance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-27
Updated: 2012-11-27
Packaged: 2017-11-19 17:15:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/575684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He must, he thinks--and it’s the last sane thought he will have for some time--be very lonely.</p>
<p>Survival and resistance are tricky things, in the absence of light and sound, but Bond's training was very thorough, and his history of being watched is very handy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	kaleidoscope telescope

**Author's Note:**

> Torture is mentioned but not explicitly described in this. Also, as I said in tags, it's gen, unless it's whatever pairing you want it to be, in which case it's possibly that.

James Bond has cobwebs woven into his clothes: filament recording devices as thin and delicate as strands of hair worked into the stitches and tailored to fit him. The clip in his ear is the exact color of his flesh and thin like a piece of tape. Amazing things they did, Q branch, after giving up on exploding pens. For the first hour, it means that he can hear Q, and M, and Eve; after the second hour, stripped, all their eyes gone into the furnace, the sound is all he has.

The earpiece draws power from his biochemistry: as long as he’s alive, he’s not alone. That seems a good enough reason to keep breathing.

 

When he’s drowning, Q says, “We’re coming, hold on,” nine hundred forty-three times as Bond’s face is pushed into and pulled out of the water. Bond counts because it is harder, more time consuming, than counting his breaths. As the water and the thinned blood from the cut above his left eye run down his face, it’s Eve, her voice thick, saying, “I’m the only one allowed to kill you, remember?”

He wants to tell her that the shot she missed wasn’t one he could have made himself. He wants to tell her that when he let her be his killer while he lived, breathed, and fucked on the beach, his head aglow with drink and anger, it was M he was trying to hurt, not her.

He wants to tell Q that he will hold on. He wants to say that he has forgotten how to do anything else. He wants to point out that nine hundred forty-three times is quite a lot of times to say something, let alone something so inane, so stupidly heart-in-throat, like all Q’s famous cleverness was bled out of him.

He wants, he wants, but the cobwebs that let them hear him are already ash, and besides that, by now he can do nothing but scream.

 

He has lived most of his life on the wrong end of the telescope and it has made him constantly aware of how watched he is. Q, young enough to have lived most of his life on CCTV screens, says that everyone is watched and he watches everybody: “ _Quis custodiet ipsos custodes_ , is what you’re asking, and _ego quis_.”

Bond drank Q’s lukewarm tea, the dregs of it sugary enough to set his teeth to aching, and he said, “I didn’t ask anything. I was saying.” That he was always reflected back in someone’s eyes, as he was then in Q’s. Q didn’t even blink. If that were a contest they were having.

He belongs on surveillance footage. He is unnamed but he is not, and never has been, invisible, not until they shut him in the dark.

 

M says, “As long as it works, you’ll have someone.” Sometimes, if Bond closes his eyes, he can imagine that Mallory is _her_ : it isn’t the timbre that matters, it’s the cadence.

She would never have promised him that, though. She would have said, “If you can find a way to do it, take your own life. We’ll clean up the rest later,” and her voice would have been stiffer than Mallory’s. He means nothing to Mallory, so Mallory can afford to be kind; he meant something to her, and she did not believe in meaning, which was weakness. He considers the advice she did not give him because she was not alive to give it. There are ways to die in the dark, even without cyanide tucked inside a hollow tooth, even without a weapon.

Bond’s training in self-destruction was very thorough.

But Q is in his ear. Q says, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit,” and Bond shuts his eyes and breathes in, breathes out.

In a hole in the ground, he lives.

 

When Q finishes _The Hobbit_ , Eve reads _The Fellowship of the Ring_. Bond is unconscious for long stretches of it. It’s not until Q starts _The Two Towers_ , his voice placid and cool, like the taste of water fresher than Bond can really remember, that he even realizes that it is, even for them, impossible. It’s been weeks. Months. He can’t still be hearing them every minute.

Q is persistent in his unreality, though. He’s a digital creature, anyway, a phantom, a ghost. He pauses in his reading to say dryly, “It’s more likely that the equipment’s faulty than that you’re dead and this is hell, you know.”

“You don’t make faulty equipment,” Bond says. He tries to move his hand to brush his newly shaggy hair from his eyes, as if Q is there for him to see, but some of his fingers are broken and the arm is, in any case, stiff from disuse, the muscles cramped. “You make—I break. It doesn’t.” He hasn’t talked since the last interrogation; hasn’t said anything besides _Fuck you_ \--or variations thereof--since they took him.

“Fine,” Q says, unruffled. “Maybe you broke it, then,” and he goes back to reading.

Bond notices, now, how the words are not words, how the words are just memories of Q, fractured through the broken kaleidoscope he’s made of his life.

He must, he thinks--and it’s the last sane thought he will have for some time--be very lonely.

 

“Honestly, 007,” M says. “You’d think this was your first time.”

He straightens. She is the steel in his spine. (She is the only story he’s never told to anyone.) “You sound like him.”

“He sounded like me.”

“You should have given me a capsule,” he says. “Mother’s milk.”

“Wouldn’t have done any good. It didn’t him.”

“I don’t look as I did anyhow,” he says, “and it isn’t as though I have much mind left to lose.”

 

The issue is how much he can fracture. He does need to. He can’t hold onto what he needs unless he loses everything else and he can’t hide what he needs to hide unless there is enough of a haystack to cover the needles. (They have started to ask him questions about Q. They have started to ask him questions about Eve. Mallory. Their home addresses, where they get their coffee, where they shop, where are they alone.) He needs cover. He needs an obvious uncertainty about reality. But if he risks too much and loses, then the funds are gone, all the thought and sanity he had to spend gone, and no one there to help him reclaim it.

“Just go,” Q says. He turns into Vesper and puts a hand on Bond’s cheek. The warmth, when it comes, is no less real for being imagined. “We’ll find you when you need finding.”

“I need finding.”

M says, “Not yet you don’t.”

 

Silva says, “There is _catharsis_ to be had, yes? There is the ecstasy of the agony, of knowing that you’ve been abandoned,” but Bond can see them, the crowd of them, and he knows that he does not have Silva’s fate yet. Unless Q is wrong and this is hell, a hell where someone reads Tolkien to him and his ghosts have fresh skin to them. Anything is possible. He supposes that, with all he’s done, if this is hell, he’s getting off lightly.

“That’s the spirit,” Q says. “Keep calm and carry on.”

“Don’t go thinking _unless Q’s wrong_ , he means,” Eve says dryly.

Q crouches in front of him, eyes dark and unreadable, and he says, “Where do I live? How did we meet?” and Bond knows that Q is not Q, not that he would have been anyway. Q is not even his dream of Q, so tauntingly solid only because he’s been given body by someone else. Bond smiles at him: this is a game then, is it?

“We met on a ship,” he says. “Because you didn’t like to fly. We met on a ship. You borrowed my watch because you kept losing your own and you said that they made you melancholy, watches. You live in a hole in the ground, like a hobbit.”

When the blow comes, he doesn’t feel it, and spitting the blood off his mouth is more habit than anything else. A person can learn to live with almost anything, if he learns to live.

After they’re gone, Q says, “I suppose you thought that was clever,” and his tone is as clipped and disapproving as M’s, his M’s, always was whenever he’d done something stupid. He holds Bond’s face straight and cleans the blood off it with a few hard swipes of a towel that’s a little rougher than it needs to be. Bond has been doctored by Q before, who does patch-up work better than one might expect, even if he always uses experimental equipment like stitches that are supposed to dissolve and instead just turn orange—he has the details to draw on. And Q has no bedside manner; Q has no manners at all.

“It _was_ clever.”

“Anything that gets you hit in the face is not _clever_.”

“Hit in the kidneys, then, I’ll try for that, if it’ll make you happy. You’re going to scrape the skin off, dammit.”

“Don’t be such a child,” Q says, with one last harsh paw across his cheek before he tosses the bloody rag off into the corner, where it melts into insubstantiality: the latest from Q branch, it's called a dream. “And don’t quibble with your hallucinations, we know best.”

Q is always turning into Vesper and Vesper is always turning into Q, but when Bond says, “Stay?” Q does, and he stays as himself, although he still looks a trifle irritated.

 

Eve brings a straight razor one day. He smiles. “I don’t think it will work.”

“You never know without trying,” she says.

It doesn’t work, of course, but it does him no harm to imagine the hot water and the lather and the blade, her hands warm and confident against his throat. He asks her about Mallory. “You’re not sleeping with him.”

“Do you think that’s how everyone gets to the top? It wasn’t for you.”

“It might have been,” he says. “Another life, maybe.”

“I’m not sleeping with M.” Even in his head, she has an easier time calling Gareth Mallory M than he does, especially since he has two M’s to sort out, one more than her. “I’m not sleeping with anyone. Having turned you down, I’ve given up on it all, packed it in.”

“You and Q,” he said, turning his head to let her reach by his ear. “There’s no call to be cheeky.”

“We all of us have better things to worry about then bed,” she says, finishing and dipping the razor back into the water bowl. If he touches his face, he knows that he will still feel the bristle of beard: for now, to preserve her satisfied smile, he keeps his hands at his sides. “Q, for the record, is going mad. For someone who claimed repeatedly in staff meetings that he didn’t like you very much, he certainly likes you very much. And I tell M that you trust us, that you’re counting on us. He doesn’t like to disappoint. We’ll find you.”

They ask him about Eve, or Silva asks him about her, he’s not sure, and he says, “She had orders to break my heart, but she missed. Now she sends people off to die before she’s had her morning tea. Good steady hand with a razor, too,” and no one comes to wipe the blood from him that time, because really, as Q would say, he should learn his lessons a little better than he does.

 

“Well,” Q says, “you _should_.”

Bond closes his eyes. He says, “We met in a tunnel twenty seconds before I was going to die. You said you wouldn’t let me.” It isn’t a lie: he can’t lie, he’s beyond it, it’s a skill he bled out or had broken already. What he needs is the kaleidoscope to fool the telescope: he needs the world to shatter and mix, colors reflecting and refracting brightly off each other. They’ve been dripping sodium pentothal in him for days now, but it’s true, in it’s way.

“It isn’t true at all,” Q says, infuriatingly literal-minded. “I met you in an art gallery.”

“And then in a tunnel.”

The first time Q was in his ear, trying to save his life, and they haven’t gone forward so much as they’ve gone back. His hands move loosely in the dirt on the floor. He can’t remember the last time he’s eaten something. He says—and it would, he knows, be a petulant voice in another man, a whine—“ _Talk_ to me,” and Q does.

 

“Don’t fuss,” M says, some time later.

It was Silva who thought Bond was the good boy, the good son, always faithful, and it’s that dream that he tries now to live up to: he doesn’t fuss. Keep calm and carry on. He does want, still, to make her proud of him.

 

“He’s not M. A bureaucrat who shoots a straight line. We met in a firestorm and I call him by a dead woman’s name because he did try to save her, for what that was worth.”

Later, when M—Mallory, not her—comes by, Bond feels as though he’s slighted him, as though he should apologize. This M, like Eve, is actually gentle when he tries to clean Bond up, although he shrugs when Bond mentions it.

“Bureaucratic practice,” he says. “Desk jobs. Makes you soft. You really shouldn’t let them break all your ribs, you know.”

“I just wanted you to know that I’m fine, following you.”

They met under the worst of circumstances and he gave Bond a week off when M died.

“Honestly, 007,” he says, “I really couldn’t give a shit.”

 

The view through the kaleidoscope is a view that changes constantly, and it shifts whether it’s his left eye or his right looking through it. He says, “I have cobwebs under my skin, ears listening in my veins,” and he means it. He says that Q bugs everything, would fit the rats with collars and tracking devices if he could, only he calls Q _Matt Smith_ , the youngest iteration, and they think he’s madder than before. Q says he’s very flattered. “You realize that makes you Amelia Pond.” He says that Eve is made of money, the maiden money, and that she’s behind every assignment he gets to cold weather areas if he doesn’t turn in paperwork on time. He met her on a train, since they’re asking. She didn’t sleep with him. She tried to kill him. He asked her about her work. Since they’re asking. M is dead or alive or in Scotland or his mother or his lover and he has one brother or none or eight, brothers and sisters with at least two corpses tied around their necks and weighing them down. MI6 is made up hobbits and trolls under bridges and Bond was in Scotland when the sky fell, did he mention? Since they’re asking. He’s fucking all of them or none of them, in bed with them, in love with them. Entangled, to be sure. Since they’re asking. He spends too much time thinking about who comes to him in the silence and the dead spaces of his head, who is the shattered color that makes the broken glass that he lives in, that cuts him, somehow lovely.

 

Everyone is watched; Bond watches everyone.

“Panopticon,” M says. “It always was a clever thought.”

“You never know why someone’s watching, though,” Vesper adds.

“ _Quis custodiet ipsos custodes_ ,” Q says. “You’re bleeding again.”

 

Bond says: “I’m always bleeding.” It may or may not be several days later.

 

When the tape in his ear reactivates, he thinks that one of his hobbies has always been resurrection. Q says, “You’re still alive, you’re still alive, oh fuck, Bond,” and he sounds like he’s crying. “Hold on. Hold on. I worked out how to triangulate your position but the stupid fucking fuckwit thing wouldn’t turn back on—just hear me, just listen, hold on,” and Bond knows that Q knows nothing of time. He can be patient. He fractures the moment and holds onto it.

 

_I met him when I was being towed away for scrap and I told him I could pull triggers if he found me things to shoot. If he found me._

_I met her because she had all the money and I had all the cards but the ace up my sleeve, which was always hers._

_I met her when she drove me to the train, because she was glad to see that I was still alive afterwards, because the water was warm when I fell into it._

_I met him when he was still looking at the world over a stack of papers, but he turned out to have steady hands and a clear head._

_I met her because I was an orphan. Because the sky fell. Because I kept not dying when I was supposed to._

Since someone’s asking. And they live nowhere, they live in his head, they live in a hole in the ground. He spits blood away. The whole room is thick with smoke. They haven’t hit him, he’s just bitten through his lip again: old habits. He says, “The thing about time is it’s fucking inevitable, and that’s how I met him, that’s where he lives, in time, and in my head,” and they shock him again. His body lifts just as the room explodes with light.

 

_Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?_ Q whispers, the Q of his imagination, and Bond says, “You do,” and when there is nothing more in the darkness of his head to see, he opens his eyes and there they are, the live ones anyhow, watching him back as if they never left. And he is in reflected in their eyes, as if they're holding onto him. As if they won't, a second time, let him go.


End file.
